Juice Lab: Get Cold-Pressed Drinks on South Beach

After a successful debut in Winter Park earlier this year, Juice Lab will soon expand its cold-pressed juice bar concept to South Florida this fall. Juice Lab will feature seasonal menus of farm-to-bottle beverage blends made from local harvests picked at the peak of freshness.

Celebrities like Demi Moore and Gwyneth Paltrow have long championed the juice cleanse, but what is it about these liquefied fruits and veggies that makes the trend so appealing?

According to Jennifer Pansa, nationally recognized yoga instructor and co-founder of Juice Lab, drinking juice can actually maximize your health and make you feel like a million bucks. What are the benefits of drinking cold-pressed juice as opposed to regular juices? The answer is in the nutrients.

"Ninety percent of juices out there have some sort of a heating process or nutrient breakdown based on the way the juice is made. Most juicers tear the fibers of the fruit, and in that process, you lose a lot of the nutrients in the fiber," Pansa said. "The difference with cold-pressed juice, which is done slowly, is that you get about five times as many nutrients. In addition, we use whole ingredients, and nothing is from concentrate."

Pansa first became acquainted with detoxification while working with her yoga students, and she hopes to spread that knowledge to a wider customer base in South Florida. Juices are crafted by co-founder and detoxification specialist, Nicolas Torrent, and are broken down into two categories: cold pressed (packaged in glass bottles and best enjoyed within 72 hours), and creamery (handmade, raw almond based milks using 100 percent whole ingredients). Torrent has traveled around the globe and experimented with some of the world's top healers and pioneers in natural health.

Juice Lab's blends are crafted on a hydraulic press that applies 2,000 pounds of pressure to produce. While this method is much slower than conventional high-speed rotary/centrifugal blade machines, it ensures that heat and speed from excess friction does not damage the living enzymatic qualities of the juice. Juice Lab's juices are bottled and served within 24 hours of leaving the ground, and the cold-pressed extraction method ensures the product arrives "alive."

"We believe simplicity is the key to achieving optimal health," Pansa said. "We adopted the 'keep it simple' mantra in creating our unique concept and allowed Mother Nature to guide us in the process of developing whole, organic, and unprocessed plant-based juice recipes."

In keeping with this simplicity, Juice Lab works with local South Florida farmers to ensure fresh, locally-sourced ingredients for their products. Juice Lab also has organized a recycling bottle deposit program where patrons can complete a punch card or return seven bottles to receive a free juice of choice.

Bottles prices range from $6 to $12 each, which can be pretty steep depending on how much you want to pay for your juice boost. Pink Lemonade, a mix of grapes, lemons, pomegranates and beets, increases lymphatic stimulation and purifies the blood stream, according to Torrent. Other options include Sweet Green (pear; cucumber; spinach; romaine; cilantro, and lime), Experiment C (orange; carrot; ginger; tumeric; haberno, and camu camu), and Mighty Green (apple; celery; kale; chard; parsley; lemon, and ginger).

"Juice Lab is a reflection of the holistic approach we take in life," he said. "It is rooted in a wealth of experience in the natural food and beverage industries to create the best juices that are tasty, nutritious, environmentally safe and easily accessible."